Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism -- The political theology of sovereignty -- In the maw of sovereignty -- Benjamin's dissipated eschatology -- Waiting for justice -- Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision -- The Hebrew republic -- Conclusion : the anarchist hypothesis.

Mystics have always claimed that a very significant kind of self-perception is possible, at the end of certain spiritual disciplines. The self that is then supposed to be known is a unity, identical from one experience to the next, and not to be identified with any particular experiences, such as impressions or ideas, which the self has. In short, mystical testimony supports something like a theory of the essential self as simple and unchanging.

A fresh explication of the Thomist justification of self-defense casts off the hobbles of the principle of double effects to find a more secure footing in the historicaldevelopment of subjective natural rights by medieval jurists, and a straight-forward application to the latent threat of death in childbirth posed by non-consensual pregnancy. By articulating the implicit Thomistic right to defensive abortion in terms of conditional rights bestowed in Creation as correlative to particular natural law duties, justly proportionate limits to defensive abortion (...) are identified, and balanced against the forfeited or reserved natural rights variously imputed to conceptus and embryo in non-consensual pregnancies. Subsequently, the varieties of involuntary consent are examined from a Thomist perspective with a view to their relevance in justifying recourse to a rehabilitated practice of defensive abortion when free and full consent to impregnation and childbirth is absent. (shrink)

In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came ...

Th e present article reports a series of experiments designed to extend the empirical investigation of folk metaethical intuitions by examining how different kinds of ethical disagreement can impact attributions of objectivity to ethical claims.

Since the late nineteenth century, studies of mysticism have presented us with two contrasting conclusions. The first is that mystics all over the world report basically the same experience, and the second is that there are great differences among the reports, and possibly among the experiences. On the positive side there are such works as Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy , with its claim that all mystics say that all beings are manifestations of a Divine Ground, that men learn of this (...) by direct intuition, that men have two natures, one phenomenal and one eternal, and that identification with his eternal nature is the purpose of man. Walter Stace supports this view, in a modified way, with his observation that, while each mystic seems to advance a peculiar explanation of his experience, their statements collectively exhibit strong similarities. Mystics commonly report a consciousness of unity, carrying with it feelings of objectivity, blessedness, and holiness. They describe their experience in paradoxical language, and say that ultimately it is ineffable. These twentieth-century observations are repetitions of those of William James, so that this basic point has become a cliché, and, as R. C. Zaehner says, ‘We have been told ad nauseum that mysticism is the highest expression of religion and that it appears in all ages and in all places in a more or less identical form, often in a religious milieu that would seem to be the reverse of propitious.’. (shrink)

Every year in this country, some 10,000 college and university courses are taught in applied ethics. And many professional organizations now have their own codes of ethics. Yet social science has had little impact upon applied ethics. This book promises to change that trend by illustrating how social science can make a contribution to applied ethics. The text reports psychological studies relevant to applied ethics for many professionals, including accountants, college students and teachers, counselors, dentists, doctors, journalists, nurses, school teachers, (...) athletes, and veterinarians. Each chapter begins with the research base of the cognitive-developmental approach--especially linked to Kohlberg and Rest's Defining Issues Test. Finally, the book summarizes recent research on the following issues: * moral judgment scores within and between professions, * pre- and post-test evaluations of ethics education programs, * moral judgment and moral behavior, * models of professional ethicseducation, and * models for developing new assessment tools. Researchers in different professional fields investigate different questions, develop different research strategies, and report different findings. Typically researchers of one professional field are not aware of research in other fields. An important aim of the present book is to bring this diverse research together so that cross-fertilization can occur and ideas from one field can transfer to another. (shrink)

Politics and religion certainly ride together throughout the Dune saga. Rationales were given to support twentieth century dictator ships, whose citizens were encouraged to see their leaders as infallible. In this way, politics in a totalitarian state resembled a religion, with a community of faithful followers and its own special theology to justify the dictator's authority. This chapter, draws parallels between the religious dimensions of politics in Frank Herbert's Dune novels and some philosophers’ views on tyranny and justice here on (...) Earth. Even in democratic countries, leaders still tend to think of themselves as in service to some higher, impersonal standard, like a set of principles, a tradition, a flag, or a constitution. Plato's readers have sometimes described the relation between the higher plane of reality of universals and the world of everyday experience in terms of the relation between heaven and earth in the Abrahamic religions. (shrink)

This paper compares the ethical decisions and attitudes of business students and practitioners. Recent unpublished data from a national study of over 1600 students are contrasted with information reported previously. Students are found consistently to make less ethical choices than practitioners, and there is some indication that students are making less ethical choices in the 1980s than in the 1960s. In addition, both students and practitioners agree that buyers should beware, view the role of business more narrowly, and find fewer (...) incentives to behave ethically over time. Codes of ethics appear to be less influential than the individual''s strong personal value system and one''s superiors behaving ethically; support for codes is declining. The paper concludes with observations about the limitations and possibilities for survey research in this area drawing on other studies that used the same instrument utilized for this paper. Some implications for future research are suggested. (shrink)

Ugo Spirito (1896–1979) was a philosopher who changed his mind, repeatedly and sometimes radically, about many of his major commitments. At different times he called himself a fascist and a communi...

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism. The authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas in the early 1980s and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded. Evaluating the principal criticisms, the authors defend the underlying concept of masculinity, which in most research use is neither reified nor essentialist. However, the criticism of trait models of gender and (...) rigid typologies is sound. The treatment of the subject in research on hegemonic masculinity can be improved with the aid of recent psychological models, although limits to discursive flexibility must be recognized. The concept of hegemonic masculinity does not equate to a model of social reproduction; we need to recognize social struggles in which subordinated masculinities influence dominant forms. Finally, the authors review what has been confirmed from early formulations and what needs to be discarded. The authors suggest reformulation of the concept in four areas: a more complex model of gender hierarchy, emphasizing the agency of women; explicit recognition of the geography of masculinities, emphasizing the interplay among local, regional, and global levels; a more specific treatment of embodiment in contexts of privilege and power; and a stronger emphasis on the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity, recognizing internal contradictions and the possibilities of movement toward gender democracy. (shrink)

Drawing upon work in evolutionary game theory and experimental philosophy, I argue that one of the roles the concept of knowledge plays in our social cognitive ecology is that of enabling us to make adaptively important distinctions between different kinds of blameworthy and blameless behaviors. In particular, I argue that knowledge enables us to distinguish which agents are most worthy of blame for inflicting harms, violating social norms, or cheating in situations of social exchange.

Angel's declared purpose is to “demystify” mysticism by approaching it as we do ordinary phenomena, and his eventual conclusion is that mystical experiences are very similar to some of our everyday experiences. To demonstrate that, he provides us with three closely-argued chapters on, successively, the typology of mysticism, the reasons for mystical silence, and the relationship of mysticism to other experiences. Ultimately, he claims that mysticism need not be mysterious because all of us have quasi-mystical experiences.

Recent empirical work on folk moral objectivism has attempted to examine the extent to which folk morality presumes that moral judgments are objectively true or false. Some researchers report findings that they take to indicate folk commitment to objectivism (Goodwin & Darley, 2008, 2010, 2012; Nichols & Folds-Bennett, 2003; Wainryb et al., 2004), while others report findings that may reveal a more variable commitment to objectivism (Beebe, 2014; Beebe et al., 2015; Beebe & Sackris, 2016; Sarkissian, et al., 2011; Wright, (...) 2018; Wright, Grandjean, & McWhite, 2013; Wright, McWhite, & Grandjean, 2014). However, the various probes that have been used to examine folk moral objectivism almost always fail to be good direct measures of objectivism. Some critics (Beebe, 2015; Pölzler, 2017, 2018) have suggested that the problems with existing probes are serious enough that they should be viewed as largely incapable of shedding any light on folk metaethical commitments. Building upon the work of Justin Khoo and Joshua Knobe (2018), I argue that many of the existing probes can be seen as good measures of the extent to which people think that the truth of one moral judgment excludes the possibility that a judgment made by a disagreeing party is also true and that the best explanation of the findings obtained using these measures is significant folk support for indexical moral relativism—the view that the content of moral judgments is context-sensitive. If my thesis is correct, many contemporary moral philosophers are deeply mistaken about the metaethical contours of folk morality in one very important respect. (shrink)

Experimental epistemology uses experimental methods of the cognitive sciences to shed light on debates within epistemology,the philosophical study of knowledge and rationally justified belief. In this first critical collection on this exciting new subfield, leading researchers tackle key questions pertaining to knowledge, evidence, and rationally justified belief.

We report the results of a study that investigated the views of researchers working in seven scientific disciplines and in history and philosophy of science in regard to four hypothesized dimensions of scientific realism. Among other things, we found that natural scientists tended to express more strongly realist views than social scientists, that history and philosophy of science scholars tended to express more antirealist views than natural scientists, that van Fraassen’s characterization of scientific realism failed to cluster with more standard (...) characterizations, and that those who endorsed the pessimistic induction were no more or less likely to endorse antirealism. (shrink)

We develop an account of laboratory models, which have been central to the group selection controversy. We compare arguments for group selection in nature with Darwin's arguments for natural selection to argue that laboratory models provide important grounds for causal claims about selection. Biologists get information about causes and cause-effect relationships in the laboratory because of the special role their own causal agency plays there. They can also get information about patterns of effects and antecedent conditions in nature. But to (...) argue that some cause is actually responsible in nature, they require an inference from knowledge of causes in the laboratory context and of effects in the natural context. This process, cause detection, forms the core of an analogical argument for group selection. We discuss the differing roles of mathematical and laboratory models in constructing selective explanations at the group level and apply our discussion to the units of selection controversy to distinguish between the related problems of cause determination and evaluation of evidence. Because laboratory models are at the intersection of the two problems, their study is crucial for framing a coherent theory of explanation for evolutionary biology. (shrink)

We report the results of an exploratory study that examines the judgments of climate scientists, climate policy experts, astrophysicists, and non-experts (N = 3367) about the factors that contribute to the creation and persistence of disagreement within climate science and astrophysics and about how one should respond to expert disagreement. We found that, as compared to non-experts, climate experts believe that within climate science (i) there is less disagreement about climate change, (ii) methodological factors play less of a role in (...) generating disagreements, (iii) fewer personal or institutional biases influence climate research, and (iv) there is more agreement about which methods should be used to examine relevant phenomena we also observed that the uniquely American political context predicted experts’ judgments about some of these factors. We also found that, in regard to disagreements concerning cosmic ray physics, and commensurate with the greater inherent uncertainty and data lacunae in their field, astrophysicists working on cosmic rays were generally more willing to acknowledge expert disagreement, more open to the idea that a set of data can have multiple valid interpretations, and generally less quick to dismiss someone articulating a non-standard view as non-expert, than climate scientists were in regard to climate science. (shrink)

We report the results of two studies that examine folk metaethical judgments about the objectivity of morality. We found that participants attributed almost as much objectivity to ethical statements as they did to statements of physical fact and significantly more objectivity to ethical statements than to statements about preferences or tastes. In both studies, younger participants attributed less objectivity to ethical statements than older participants. Females were observed to attribute slightly less objectivity to ethical statements than males, and we found (...) important interactions between attributions of objectivity and other factors, such as how strong participants’ moral opinions were and how much disagreement about the issue they perceived to exist within society. We believe our results have significant implications for debates about the nature of folk morality and about the nature of morality in general. (shrink)

We report the results of four empirical studies designed to investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested that our shared epistemic practices may only include a source-relative closure principle—one that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. We argue that the results of our studies provide reason for thinking that individuals are making a performance error when their knowledge attributions and denials conflict with (...) the closure principle. When we used research materials that overcome what we think are difficulties with Turri’s original materials, we found that participants did not reject closure. Furthermore, when we presented Turri’s original materials to non-philosophers with expertise in deductive reasoning (viz., professional mathematicians), they endorsed closure for both perceptual and inferential beliefs. Our results suggest that an unrestricted closure principle—one that applies to all beliefs, regardless of their source—provides a better model of folk patterns of knowledge attribution than a source-relative closure principle. (shrink)

Having asked, “What, then, is time?” Augustine admitted, “I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled.” We all have a sense of time, but the description and explanation of it remain remarkably elusive. Through a series of detailed descriptions, Husserl attempted to clarify this sense of time. In my book, I trace the development of his account of our temporal self-awareness, starting (...) with his early 1905-1909 lectures on time consciousness and proceeding through the 1917-18 Bernau Manuscripts, the Analyses of Passive Syntheses of the 1920’s and ending with the C, B and E manuscripts on time and instincts of the 1930s. Although my book covers all the stages of Husserl’s account of temporality, it is nonetheless systematic in its approach. It is organized about a number of basic topics in the theory of time and presents and critically appraises Husserl’s positions on the issues pertaining to each. • THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF TIME: Is time objective or subjective? Is it “out there,” a part of external reality or does it have a merely subjective existence, residing only in our memories and anticipations? Does Husserl’s “subjective” account presuppose ob-jective time? • THE “PRESENCE” OF THE PAST AS PAST: Memory, if it is to be distinguished from a direct, sensuous perception, must grasp the past as past. It must somehow “see” what no longer exists as no longer existing. The issue is: how do we do this? The same question arises with regard to our grasp through anticipation of the future as future. • THE TEMPORALITY OF OBJECTS: For Husserl, the apprehension of any sort of extended event, such as a melody, involves the synthesis of the “retentions” (the short term memories) of its notes and the anticipations these retentions awake in us. The question, here, is: what exactly is involved in this synthesis of retentions and anticipa-tions? How can these elements come together to present a single, individual object rather than presenting us with merely a collection of disparate presentations? In other words: How does temporal synthesis accomplish this presentation? • THE TEMPORALITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Husserl asserts that consciousness, in placing its object in time also places itself in time. How does it do this? What is the relation between the consciousness that places itself in time and the consciousness that is placed in time? How do we unify them? • THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF TIME-CONSTITUTING PHENOMENA: Husserl claims that “time-constituting phenomena are evidently objectivities fundamentally different than those constituted in time. They are neither individual objects nor individual processes, and the predicates of such objects or processes cannot be meaningfully ascribed to them.” This assertion raises a number of questions about the ontological status of these time-constituting phenomena. If we cannot apply the predicates of individual objects to them, what is the nature of their being? Given that such phenomena com-pose the field of consciousness, what is the ontological status of consciousness? Furthermore, if our apprehension directs itself towards individual objects, how can our consciousness grasp the pre-individual, time-constituting phenomena that make it up? At issue here is the status of Husserl’s own descriptions of consciousness and the temporal process. Does his theory undermine the possibility of the evidence he presents for it? • THE RELATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO THE EGO: Our sense of self involves more than our consciousness, more than the memories, perceptions, and anticipations that give it its content. It involves our sense as the subjective referent of every act, as the person to whom the world appears, as the one who is affected by the world and who acts with regard to it. What is the relation of this sense of self to our time consciousness? How does the simultaneous constitution of consciousness and its object result in the presence of the I that is the subject of consciousness? (shrink)

The results of four experiments provide evidence for controlled processing in the absence of awareness. Participants identified the colour of a neutral distracter word. Each of four words was presented in one of the four colours 75% of the time or 50% of the time . Colour identification was faster when the words appeared in the colour they were most often presented in relative to when they appeared in another colour, even for participants who were subjectively unaware of any contingencies (...) between the words and the colours. An analysis of sequence effects showed that participants who were unaware of the relation between distracter words and colours nonetheless controlled the impact of the word on performance depending on the nature of the previous trial. A block analysis of contingency-unaware participants revealed that contingencies were learned rapidly in the first block of trials. Experiment 3 showed that the contingency effect does not depend on the level of awareness, thus ruling out explicit strategy accounts. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that the contingency effect results from behavioural control and not from semantic association or stimulus familiarity. These results thus provide evidence for implicit control. (shrink)

The goal of this book is to develop a new approach to reading the rule-following sections guided by a simple idea. The simple idea is that Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following are split between two distinct but complementary projects. The projects are marked not only by different guiding questions, but different presuppositions and methodologies. There is of course precedent for reading the rule-following remarks as comprising two parts. For example, there is the reading of (S. Kripke 1982) on which Wittgenstein first (...) presents a skeptical challenge before turning to its skeptical solution. And there are readings like (Minar 2011) and (Goldfarb 2012) that likewise treat the sections as roughly divided into two components or "chapters." But even these commentators do not explicitly associate their components with different questions and associated methodologies, and so fall short of attributing to Wittgenstein's text anything quite like the thoroughgoing bipartite structure I will be proposing here. (shrink)

Knobe (2003a, 2003b, 2004b) and others have demonstrated the surprising fact that the valence of a side-effect action can affect intuitions about whether that action was performed intentionally. Here we report the results of an experiment that extends these findings by testing for an analogous effect regarding knowledge attributions. Our results suggest that subjects are less likely to find that an agent knows an action will bring about a side-effect when the effect is good than when it is bad. It (...) is further argued that these findings, while preliminary, have important implications for recent debates within epistemology about the relationship between knowledge and action. (shrink)

Infamous cases like Enron and Bernie Madoff question whether business is an inherently dubious activity. Honorable Business argues that there is, in fact, such a thing as honorable business, which seeks to generate value not only for itself but for all parties to its transactions-and to society generally.

Blackmail raises a pair of parallel legal and moral problems, sometimes referred to as the "paradox of blackmail". It is sometimes legal and morally permissible to ask someone for money, or to threaten to release harmful information about them, while it is illegal and morally impermissible to do these actions jointly. I address the moral version of this paradox by bringing instances of blackmail under a general account of wrongful coercion. According to this account, and contrary to the appearances which (...) give rise to the paradox, threatening the release of harmful information to constrain another's actions is almost never morally impermissible unless it is likewise impermissible to carry out one's threat. To defend this claim I identify a special wrong that arises in the paradoxical cases of threatened information release. The account also resolves a number of other puzzles about blackmail—for example, why profiting from a threat in blackmail can sometimes be impermissible, even though accepting identical payment from an independent offer to retain the same information can be permissible. (shrink)

The second in James Hurford's acclaimed two-volume exploration of the biological evolution of language explores the evolutionary and cultural preconditions and consequences of humanity's great leap into language.

A common response to radical skeptical challenges to our knowledge of the external world has been that there are explanatory reasons (e.g., simplicity, coherence, explanatory power, conservatism) for favoring commonsense explanations of our sensory experiences over skeptical explanations. Despite the degree of visibility this class of response has enjoyed, it has often been viewed with skepticism [sic] by the epistemological community because of concerns about the epistemic merits of explanatory reasoning. I argue that skeptical challenges that employ skeptical hypotheses presuppose (...) central explanationist tenets and that this fact should raise one’s estimation of the strength of explanationist responses to skepticism. (shrink)

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which (...) objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose. (shrink)